Monthly Archives: April 2011

Cheaters Defy Logic

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Interesting. Many people suck at formal logic, but get much better when the problem is framed in terms of cheating.

Detecting Cheaters

Another way of saying this is that they turn over the “benefit received” card to make sure the cost was paid. And they turn over the “cost not paid” card to make sure no benefit was received. They look for cheaters.
The difference is startling. Subjects don’t need formal logic training. They don’t need math or philosophy. When asked to explain their reasoning, they say things like the answer “popped out at them.”

There’s also this:

People are just bad at the Wason selection task. They also tend to only take college logic classes upon requirement.

I took logic in college because it was a way of getting one of my humanities credits (taught by the philosophy department) with a class that was a lot like math.

The Limits of Crowdsourcing

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aka “no amount of hot air balloons can save a bad idea”

A few days ago on the forum, after a newly-registered poster inquired how to get ahold of TEPCO so he could give them his idea for fixing the leak, I suggested that it was a bit naive to think that a layperson is going to suggest a viable solution that had not already occurred to the people working the problem. I got some static for that position. No matter — here’s someone who agrees.

Guardian readers ‘fix’ the Fukushima power plant

[T]here’s this odd, growing trend in the world today, fed by endless news vox-pops and the general ‘X-Factorization’ of television, that somehow everyone’s opinions are valuable and worth listening to.

Bollocks.

Crowdsourcing can work, but you have to have expertise from which to draw. That’s the idea behind a discussion forum: you have enough people together and odds are good that someone (if not several people) will know the answer to a question. But it all rests on a subset of the crowd having a level of expertise. You aren’t asking a random person for the answer, you’re asking (ideally, anyway) someone who knows what they are talking about. In other words, it’s not guesswork.

You're Wrong About One Thing

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… that whole “That’s not funny” part

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Best. iPad Prank. Ever

Martinez gives a report on “piezo-electrics” — a phantom technology which electronically emits smell and taste from the screens of your iPad and iPhone. He coaxes his co-anchor to sniff and eventually lick (!) the screen of an iPad, only to find an “April Fools!” screen pop up shortly thereafter.

Piezoelectric technology is most definitely real; the “phantom” part is about letting you create smells and sounds. But what do you expect from a business site?

How Green is My Valley?

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Earth Observatory Image of the Day: Thirteen Years of Greening from SeaWiFS

From 1998 to 2010, the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view-Sensor, or SeaWiFS, made a simple but elegant measurement: how “green” is the Earth. That is, how much chlorophyll—the pigment that helps turn sunlight into organic energy for plants—is present in the seas and on land. Those measurements offered a window into the planet’s ability to support life. The long, well-calibrated data record also gives scientists one of the best benchmarks to study the planet’s biological response to a changing environment.

The image above shows SeaWiFS data as a global average over the entire 13-year record. For the oceans, the colors represent the concentration of chlorophyll and indicate where phytoplankton most often bloomed since 1998. On the land, data are depicted as a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which shows the density of green vegetation. An NDVI of zero means no green plants and a high value (0.8 or 0.9) is a thick canopy of green leaves.

Apply Online

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Why Is It Rocket Science That Laws Should Apply Online Too?

When I write a letter to somebody, nobody has the right to intercept the letter in transit, break its seal and examine its contents unless I am under formal, individual and prior suspicion of a specific crime. In that case, law enforcement (and only them) may do this. Of course, I am never under any obligation to help anybody open and interpret my letters. It is perfectly reasonable to demand that this applies online as well.

When I write a letter to somebody, no third party has the right to alter the contents of the letter in transit or deny its delivery entirely. Shouldn’t it be perfectly reasonable to demand that this applies online as well?

When I write a letter to somebody, nobody has the right to stand at the mailbox and demand that they be able to log all my communications: who I am communicating with, when, and for how long. Again, to demand that this applies online as well would only be logical.

Pretty good questions.

It's Like Those Miserable Psalms

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… they’re soooo depressing.

This story about a bank getting off light, Wachovia Paid Trivial Fine for Nearly $400 Billion of Drug Related Money Laundering, made me flash back to two recent stories: Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? and another article (whose title or link I can’t recall) pointing out the ridiculousness of fining a company trivial amounts for large illegal profits. If the penalty is less than the profit, that’s not a deterrent — it’s a business plan.

No, He's Not the Guy Who Wrote those Fairy Tales

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The birth of electromagnetism (1820)

It is oddly fitting that the birth of electromagnetism, and an entirely new direction in physics, started with the tiniest twitch of a compass needle. In the year 1820, Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851) observed the twitch of said compass needle in the presence of an electric current, providing the first definite evidence of a link between electricity and magnetism that would set the tone for much of modern physics.

The story of Oersted’s experiment is the stuff of physics legend, but like most legends it is often misremembered and exaggerated. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating piece of work and a piece of scientific history worth recounting.